Ronnie Marmo Turns 36 Years Sober on Opening Night of Bill W. and Dr. Bob

Ronnie Marmo Turns 36 Years Sober on Opening Night of Bill W. and Dr. Bob

Opening night in Chicago. The house lights are still up, the actors are at places, and a few of them who are not sober have no idea what is about to happen. Then the entire audience, unprompted, starts reciting the Serenity Prayer.

Backstage, panic. What’s going on? What is that?

“That’s our people,” Ronnie Marmo told them. “Don’t worry about it.”

That is what it is like to bring Bill W. and Dr. Bob to a new city. The play is about the two drunks who met in Akron in 1935 and accidentally started a worldwide fellowship. It has been running on and off in Los Angeles for 25 years under Marmo’s Theatre 68 banner, and this fall it goes back on the road. It opens September 3 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, Illinois.

September 3 also happens to be Ronnie’s sobriety birthday. Thirty-six years.

“Oh, so you’re a newcomer,” I said when he told me. He laughed. He is the kind of guy who gets the joke before you finish it.

Never Had a Legal Drink

Ronnie got sober at an age when most people are still figuring out fake IDs. “Never had a legal drink or a drug or a cigarette,” he said. “Thank God for crack. It helped me go to my knees quicker than maybe just alcohol would have.”

That is a Brooklyn-by-way-of-Jersey sentence if I have ever heard one.

The Part Nobody Talks About

What interested me more than his Day One was his Year Twenty. Ronnie described a decade where he was, in his words, skating. One meeting a week, and the only reason he went to that one was because he held the treasurer commitment and knew that if he let go of it, he might be in real trouble.

Then a guy stood up and said Ronnie had been treasurer for ten years and it was time to rotate. A vote was held. The guy who made the motion won the job.

“A good old-fashioned resentment could be helpful to keep you coming, too,” Ronnie said. “I stood in the back for a year staring at this guy going, I’m gonna get that commitment back. I see you, buddy.” A year to the day, they voted him back in.

Around 27 years he hit what he calls a real wall. He got a new sponsor and started the steps over like a newcomer. “Saved my life, changed my life.”

The Script He Carried for Ten Years

Bill W. and Dr. Bob was written by Samuel Shem (the pen name of Stephen Bergman, who wrote The House of God) and his wife, Janet Surrey. Neither of them is a playwright by trade. Ronnie did not write it. He almost was not in it.

Someone in New Jersey handed him the script back when he had not yet made a living as an actor. They did not know he was sober. The production fell through, but he kept the script and carried it around for at least a decade thinking, one day.

When he finally produced it in the early 2000s, he nearly did not. Seventh Tradition. He did not want to look like he was cashing in on the program that kept him alive.

His sponsor talked him through it. Charge what you need to cover the show, be of service, see what happens.

“Within days of opening, people were coming out of the woodwork,” Ronnie said. “Thank you, I couldn’t stay sober before, now I can. This play changed my life. So I went from, should I do it, to it’s my responsibility to do it.”

He started inviting rehabs. He told people without money to come anyway. Every couple of years he brought it back to LA, and every year in between the messages piled up. When is the show coming back. Please do the show.

A Man Who Could Talk a Dog Off a Meat Wagon

Ronnie now plays Bill W. himself. He finally got old enough. He also spent a week at Stepping Stones, the Wilsons’ home in Katonah, New York — sitting at Bill’s actual desk, reading the letters Bill and Lois wrote to each other. For a man 36 years sober who has been carrying this story for decades, that week had to land differently than research. That is not preparation. That is homecoming.

He does not do an impression. “I just try to bring his energy and his spirit to it.” Where he got sober, people used to ask each other: are you a Bill or a Bob? Bill is manic, big-picture, we’ll save millions. Bob is the guy saying, let’s just get one more.

There is a line in the play where Ann Smith, Dr. Bob’s wife, tells Bill he is “a man who could talk a dog off a meat wagon.”

Ronnie is a Bill. So am I. My hair — which also has opinions and does not take direction — is the tell.

The Argument I Lost

I went into this call with a theory I had been carrying around for a week. My theory was that no actor can really play one of us without lived experience. Exhibit A: Jamie Lee Curtis as Donna Berzatto on The Bear, the amends scene. To me, that was not acting. That was lived experience.

A podcast host had already pushed back on me. Now Ronnie did too.

“You’re gonna be mad at me right now,” he said. “Because I think she’s right.” Then: “However. That’s, like, the cherry on top.”

He plays Lenny Bruce in a one-man show, and Bruce never found recovery and died at 40 of an overdose. He plays Bill Wilson, who did. He said both men live in him. But when a script asks for Lenny’s love for his mother, Ronnie is thinking about his own mom, who died when he was 24. She was 53. When a scene requires tears, he does not think about dead puppies or caskets. He thinks about something beautiful or hopeful. “People won’t know that, because it’s my job as an actor to figure that out.”

His Dr. Bob is not sober. After every show, people come up to him in tears. You’ll always be my Dr. Bob. The amends scene. That moment with your wife. The actor’s reaction, according to Ronnie: I can’t believe these people exist.

Fine. I have fully changed my mind. Lived experience is the cherry, not the sundae.

Where to See It

The cast on this leg is almost entirely Chicago-based. Ronnie and Janelle Marmo, who plays Lois Wilson in LA and books the tour, are the only two actors flying in. Chicago actors need the work, and Ronnie made a point of saying so. Nobody gets into this profession expecting to get paid.

Fall 2026 tour dates — and if you are anywhere near Skokie next week, you have four chances:

• Skokie, IL: September 3, 4, and 5 (four performances), North Shore Center for the Performing Arts
• Iola, KS: September 11, Bowlus Fine Arts Center
• Charleston, IL: September 18 and 19, Doudna Fine Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University
• Galloway, NJ: October 3, Stockton Performing Arts Center

And then, because the universe occasionally reads my calendar:

• Longview, WA: April 24, 2027, Columbia Theatre
• Olympia, WA: April 25, 2027, 4 p.m., Washington Center for the Performing Arts

I will be at both Washington shows. Tickets are on sale now at billwanddrbobonstage.com.

Bring someone who has never heard the story. Bring someone who has heard it a thousand times.

And if the whole room starts praying before the curtain goes up, don’t worry about it. That’s our people.

Play

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SOBER LIFESTYLE: The Big Book Found Its Way Home

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CURATED CRAFTS: Bedazzling My Big Book: Because Recovery Deserves Rhinestones

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WHAT A TRIP! A Pilgrimage to Akron and a Visit to Dr. Bob’s House

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